


Waste of Hyperspace

by pesky_poltergeist



Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Body Horror, Fourth Dimension, The Accident, ghosts are monsters from another dimension, hyperspace au, idk what rating this will end up with but do i ever
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-13
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:46:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22685692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pesky_poltergeist/pseuds/pesky_poltergeist
Summary: Why was she looking at him like that? And hadn’t he just turned his head? Oh, no, he’d only turned the farthest one, hadn’t he? He turned the others.That didn’t seem right.“I think I’m going to be sick,” he said, and he thought that was rather fair, considering he’d just watched all of his atoms spill out like a runaway box of marbles.Tucker lifted him up—the him that was on the lab floor, in the fetal position—and Danny spit out ectoplasm.He watched the three of them watch the green goo fall from four of his mouths and decided that something was very wrong with him.* * *AU, or arguably canon-to-the-extreme. Ghosts are monsters from another dimension--the fourth dimension. Loosely based in physics.Not sure how far I'm going to take this, since I really want to focus on Blue Interregnum. But switching between two projects helps me think sometimes so who knows.
Comments: 58
Kudos: 152





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Highly recommended viewing:
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0WjV6MmCyM
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDaKzQNlMFw&feature=emb_title

The portal chewed him up, electrocuted him, tore his body apart one particle at a time, built him a new one, broke that one too, settled on something _stretched,_ and spat him back out.

All in the span of fifteen minutes to the left. Or was it to the right?

Danny groaned, burying his face in his hands while running fingers through his hair and curling into the fetal position with his legs stretched out, stiff, corpselike.

“D-Danny?” Sam was looking down at him, hands hovering over his back, and Danny couldn’t figure out how he could see that, so he turned his head. “Oh, God, Danny?”

Why was she looking at him like that? And hadn’t he just turned his head? Oh, no, he’d only turned the farthest one, hadn’t he? He turned the others.

That didn’t seem right.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” he said, and he thought that was rather fair, considering he’d just watched all of his atoms spill out like a runaway box of marbles.

Tucker lifted him up—the him that was on the lab floor, in the fetal position—and Danny spit out ectoplasm.

He watched the three of them watch the green goo fall from four of his mouths and decided that something was very wrong with him.

* * *

Danny didn’t remember anything about the accident when he woke up.

His head was pounding and he saw lights on his eyelids. _A migraine. Great,_ he thought.

He wasn’t sure whether opening his eyes was a good idea or not. He listened to the ticking of his clock until he couldn’t take it anymore. He opened his eyes.

He wished he hadn’t.

He could see _everything,_ and he couldn’t make sense of any of it at all.

Was this some kind of migraine aura? That had to be it, didn’t it?

“Hey, Danny, how are you feeling?” Sam asked. She patted his knee gently.

Danny shivered, recoiling from her touch. Or he thought he had, but he could still feel her hand on his knee.

“Not good,” he said. “What happened?”

“You went into the portal to check out the wiring. You tripped, and… I guess you fixed it. It turned on,” Tucker said.

That explained the headache.

Danny sat up, feeling sluggish, like he was moving in frames and the picture was fucked up to have two of him on each. He said as much to Tucker and Sam.

“That’s weirdly specific, but yeah, I guess I know what you mean?” Tucker said. He passed Danny a glass of water and a couple pills. “Aspirin.”

Danny swallowed the pills and downed the water, and tried not to linger on the fact that the water was hollow. He didn’t know what that meant, either, but he felt it regardless.

Danny tried to focus on something in his room, anything, but he couldn’t. Nothing made sense. He was in his room, he knew. But it was too _much,_ the opposite of the way the water was empty.

“I think I’m hallucinating,” Danny admitted. “Did I hit my head?”

Sam sighed. “I don’t want to scare you, but we don’t really know what happened to you. One second you were there, and the next you were just… gone. Disappeared entirely. But the portal was on. You sort of just fell into the lab a few minutes later.”

Danny leaned back against the bed. “I think I just need to sleep,” he said. “I’m really tired.”

“I don’t know, man. What if you have a concussion?” Tucker asked.

Danny rolled over and curled up into his blankets. “I might have just fallen into an interdimensional portal and been spit back out, and that didn’t kill me. I’ll take my chances,” he said.

Neither Tucker nor Sam argued, and Danny quickly fell asleep, intent on feeling better in the morning.

* * *

He did _not_ feel better in the morning. He didn’t feel better the next morning, or the morning after that for that matter.

He’d had to admit to his parents that he’d had a lab accident—a minor one, he’d insisted. A light shock. Nothing to worry about, he was just tired, he needed to rest.

His parents had insisted on medical treatment, of course, and his father had put his first PHD to good use on every in-home test he could think of to make sure Danny was ok.

And Danny really _was_ ok. Nothing came back on the tests, so he had to be.

He didn’t tell them that he was seeing double. More than double. He wasn’t even sure how to describe how much more he was seeing. It still didn’t entirely make sense, but he was piecing it together. He was seeing his room but also some sort of prairie, and a forest, and some swirling, green-purple thing that was simultaneously some color he had no name for. That was all he could make out so far, but he was able to maneuver by himself again, so he was glad for the progress.

He still felt restricted in some way, like he was chained up somehow.

Danny thought briefly that it might be better if he was honest with his parents.

He shook away the idea. No, they’d almost had him medflighted over what they thought was a small shock. If he told them everything that was going on, he’d probably be in an isolation unit for a month.

Besides, it was getting better. He’d be fine.

His parents had cleared him to go back to class. He wasn’t really looking forward to it, but it was better than lying in bed and doing nothing (and the threat of hospitalization still hovered), so he agreed.

Danny had a little trouble getting around the school, between dodging students, corridors that weren’t part of the school, and abstract shapes of not-green goo dripping upwards.

Eventually, he made it to his locker. He was never so glad to have had as much homework as he did. There was nothing important left in his locker, so he wouldn’t have to open it. Reading was definitely off the table until he got this under control.

“How are you feeling, Danny?” Tucker asked.

“Fine,” Danny said.

He tried not to think about how Tucker was standing in one of the trees.

* * *

Danny was about ready to admit that maybe, _just maybe,_ this wasn’t going to get better.

He hadn’t realized it at first, but now that he was getting the hang of there being multiple landscapes at once, he’d learned he could look inside objects.

Only some objects. Others were fuller, but he still couldn’t pin that down.

Danny ran his fingers through his hair (and it felt like there were bandages wrapped tight over his fingers, holding him together). He looked through his desk, eyes landing on the laptop in the drawer. He took it out.

(Had he opened the drawer to take it out? He must have.)

He squinted until the words stopped swirling enough that he could vaguely read the screen. He put in his password and turned on Tucker’s video app to call his friends.

They picked up almost immediately, probably working on homework and looking for any excuse to get out of it.

They skipped the pleasantries. “What’s wrong, Danny?” Sam asked.

He felt like people had been asking him that too much lately. He also felt like it was going to get worse before it got better.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Could we meet up? Somewhere private?”

“Yeah. Nasty Burger in twenty?”

They all agreed.

* * *

Tucker looked at him like he’d grown another head. “Ok, describe it to me again,” he said.

Danny groaned, falling back into the vinyl seating and resting his head against the wall. “I already did eight times,” he said.

“Forgive us if we’re having a hard time understanding this one,” Sam said dryly, but without malice.

Danny sucked in a deep breath. _Don’t get mad,_ he reminded himself. It wasn’t fair to expect Tucker or Sam to understand what he was seeing. It had taken him days to even start to understand it, and he could actually see it. That they were trying was enough.

Besides, they were as frustrated as he was. He could see it painting red fractals in their minds.

Another deep breath. “Ok. I went into the portal. I tripped. It turned on. I passed out. And now I’m seeing everything from…” He groaned. There wasn’t any word to describe what he was seeing. “… _out_. I’m seeing things that I shouldn’t be able to.”

Sam rubbed her eyes. “That makes no sense, Danny,” she said.

Tucker straightened up and slammed his milkshake down on the table. “No, hold on, I think it actually does.” He lifted up his jacket. “Tell me what’s in my pockets,” he said.

Danny wet his lips. He could see it. How could he see it? It still didn’t make any sense. “42 cents, a fidget cube, your phone, and a flash drive in a plastic bag.”

Tucker dumped his pockets and showed the contents to Sam, looking entirely too smug.

Sam looked ready to rip her hair out. “What am I missing,” she said, more of a demand than a question.

Danny wished he knew.

Tucker was grinning wildly, a frenzied look in his eyes. He was excited. His fractals were yellow-orange and sparking like fireworks. “Ok. Danny said he’s seeing things he shouldn’t see, right? And he just told me what was inside a closed object.”

At least Tucker explained himself better than Danny did.

“Your parents said the Ghost Zone is another reality.” Tucker paused, waiting, but no one answered. He huffed. “It’s a _higher_ reality! The portal must have thrown you out into the fourth dimension. Fifth, if we want to count time.”

Sam and Danny remained silent.

Tucker leaned forward and rubbed his palms together. He patted his knees a few times as he collected his thoughts. “Ok, so like, we live in 3D, yeah? Pretend we live in 2D. We wouldn’t be able to understand a sphere as anything but a circle, because we wouldn’t understand the concept of _up,_ just left and right. We’d only see the outline of a sphere like you’d cut a super thin slice out of it,” he said.

Sam nodded slowly. “Ok, I think I’m following so far,” she said.

“So the portal zaps Danny, and suddenly he’s seeing everything in 3D. He can see the sphere, he can understand _up._ He can see inside a circle and know it’s green. Except we live in the third dimension, and Danny’s looking through the fourth, so he can look in my pockets and see what’s in there because he’s seeing on an axis we can’t,” Tucker said.

Danny nodded. That was all it was, wasn’t it? He was just seeing the fourth dimension. That was weird enough.

There definitely wasn’t anything else. That would be too much.

Danny didn’t mention the feeling like worms in his fingers.


	2. Chapter 2

Things were getting worse.

It had been a month since the Accident. Danny was, weirdly, starting to adjust to seeing inside of objects (seeing inside of his own hands was really bizarre). He was starting to realize that what he thought at first were overlaps were really connections that only touched in the _out_ direction. He was even willing to accept that this might just be his new normal, and that he could still function routinely (although reading was still exceptionally difficult).

But now Danny felt something was cracking inside him. He felt like an egg about to hatch. Something was trying to break free, and he had no idea what.

He’d been sick lately. Everything he ate or drank was empty and he craved something with substance. He was losing weight.

Danny poked at his potatoes.

“Hey, Mom, could there be like… ghost bacteria?” he asked.

Maddie cocked her head. “Mm, almost certainly, though just how much it would resemble bacteria as we know it is up for debate. But yes, I suspect even in another dimension that’s a biological niche that would need filling,” Maddie said.

She took a bite of her broccoli. Jazz ignored them, nose deep in a book. Jack had already left for the living room to knit. Danny took a bite of his steak, even though he knew it didn’t matter. He had to keep up appearances.

“Could ghost bacteria infect humans?” he asked. “What would that look like?”

“Well, I suppose we don’t know for sure if they can, or why they would. But I suppose in theory… the most dangerous aspect would be that they could move parts of the human body into a direction we can’t see.”

“The W-axis,” Danny supplied.

Maddie grinned widely. “Yes! Honey, have you been reading our papers? Are you interested in our work?”

That had Jazz peeking out from behind her book, eyes narrowed at Danny. Her mind was spinning with pink confusion.

“I guess now that the portal’s working, it’s more interesting than when it was all theoretical,” Danny said.

Jazz rolled her eyes and looked back to her book. “That portal doesn’t prove anything yet. I won’t argue that you opened a hole in space-time, but until you try to look at the other side, there’s no telling if it’s our world or not,” she said.

“Well, Jazz sweetie, it’s not safe right now for us to go through the portal. Your father and I are working on a vehicle that would let us travel safely through the Ghost Zone, but if we tried to go now the temperature would kill us. It’s nearly absolute zero on the other side,” Maddie smiled widely. “But Jack and I have been working out the mathematics of opening that portal for decades. It matches all of our predictions, and the chemical breakdown occurring at the boundary proves that the other side of the portal is a higher dimension.”

Jazz sighed and returned to her book.

“So you call it the Ghost Zone, but you never talk about dead people,” Danny started.

Maddie nodded. “That’s right. Your father and I call higher dimensional beings ‘ghosts’ because we believe that spectral apparitions are the results of their passing through our dimension, or in the cases of shadow people, disembodied heads and such, we believe those are shadows cast from the fourth dimension into ours. That’s also how we know that ghosts are evil—they seem to enjoy playing with us 3D beings.”

Silence, except for the sound of forks scraping up cold, soggy broccoli.

A sound that Danny heard as normal, then inside out. He grit his teeth.

Great. Another sense to get completely fucked up.

“Thanks for the chat but I have homework,” Danny said.

His mother garbled something in response. He didn’t have the slightest what she’d said, but her fractals were still excited, bubbling yellow from his interest in her work. She didn’t show the slightest hint of concern.

Danny smiled, waved, and retreated to the safety of his room.

* * *

It was 4:15 in the morning.

Danny was curled under his bed, palms pressed to his ears to try and drown out the awful noise. He’d made a couple discoveries which had unnerved him more than the sound.

First, he could block out the sound with his hands.

Second, he could _not_ block out the sound with his pillows.

Something in him was hearing the _out_ sounds, seeing _out_ of 3D space, and feeling the touch of something beyond.

Danny’s hands shook. His heart raced. Was he sick? Had some ghost disease infected him? Were parts of his body drifting in another part of space-time?

He felt sick. He was burning up like an acetone-dipped candle wick. His hands were slick with sweat. He was also shivering uncontrollably, clenching his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering.

He stayed under the bed, curled up in a blanket, until the sun peeked through the window.

He didn’t feel better, but he rolled out from under the bed, anyway. He had to keep up appearances.

He couldn’t let his parents know what was happening to him. He’d never given it much thought before, but… they thought the fourth dimension was inherently evil. What would they think, if they knew what was wrong with him?

The worms in his fingers felt like they were about to break free.

Danny grabbed his backpack, ran downstairs, and scribbled out a note: “Meeting Tuck, left early.” He left it on the fridge.

* * *

Danny’s head was spinning. His body was leaving afterimages wherever he moved, as quick to disappear as they were to form. Colors were inverted. It was a crapshoot if he heard sound like normal or inside out. Everything he touched seemed to bow under his touch. The sidewalk was sticking to his sneakers like half-dried glue.

Danny didn’t know where he was going until he reached the school. At least he could still rely on muscle memory to guide him. The yard was full of students—he didn’t know what time it was, but it must not be long until classes started. He guessed he had ten minutes.

Danny stood against the wall by the stairs and felt the world wobbling like he was lost at sea. His skin was vibrating. He was debating if he should go to class. He wanted to keep up appearances, but—could he even hide this?

Students made their way up the stairs. It was almost time for first bell. Danny sucked in a breath, wiped the sweat from his face with the front of his shirt, and followed after them.

He took his usual seat at the back of the class and stared at his notebook. He pretended to be busy taking notes. He was writing gibberish, he knew, but he did that anyway when he was half-asleep. Mr. Falluca didn’t notice. He wished Sam and Tucker were in this class with him.

Everything hurt. He felt like he was on fire. Was he? He didn’t see anything resembling a flame. It felt like his skull had been split with an ax.

His head was swimming. He could barely see anything anymore. Sounds echoed. The afterimages of his body were lasting longer and longer.

Danny bit his tongue until it bled to keep from making faces. He was pretty sure he was sweating again.

A sharp pain in his chest sent him reeling against the lockers. He didn’t remember coming out into the hall. Students were walking past him, ignoring him—class must have ended. He couldn’t remember. Why couldn’t he remember?

Danny breathed quick and shallow breaths. He curled his fingers against the cool metal behind him. His brain was melting, it had to be, it was dripping out his eyes and ears and distorting everything and that was why he couldn’t remember.

Cool hands touched his arms and he leaned into it, glad for the relief from the burning hot pain. He smelled cheap cologne. Tucker?

“Danny, I’m going to take you to the nurse, ok?” Tucker said.

“Can’t. Not normal. Something weird,” Danny slurred, words barely intelligible. “You don’t like nurses.”

Tucker said something, but it was inverted. He guided Danny through the halls carefully but quickly, out the back door, and into an old, unused building by the football field.

Tucker set Danny down against the wall. Danny didn’t protest, too weak now to even make an attempt. He felt like jelly. His bones undulated.

“Danny, talk to me,” Tucker said. “What’s wrong?”

Danny pressed his head against his knees. Every sound was agony, shredding his feeble mind. “Fuck fuck fuck,” he said into jeans. Tucker grabbed his shoulders. His clothes felt like sandpaper on his skin. Danny shook his head, words slipping from his tongue but he didn’t know what he was saying. Tucker lifted his hands and put them against Danny’s head to steady him. His hair compressed and it felt like needles on his scalp.

Danny sobbed. Tucker hushed him and petted his hair. Danny couldn’t remember how to tell him to stop.

Something in his chest fluttered. It wasn’t his heart, but near to it. He sucked in a breath. White, bottomless pain flared under his breastbone.

Danny screamed, and the pain spread.

Something unfolded inside him.

* * *

Danny was on the ground again. Sam was shaking him. Tucker was fighting back tears.

Danny groaned. Nothing hurt anymore, but the absence of it was… strange. He felt strange.

He pushed himself off the ground, head bowed. Sam gasped. Tucker’s eyes widened.

“What,” he said. He felt _really_ strange.

“Your arms are gone,” Sam said too quickly. “They just—they were just there, but they’re gone. They disappeared. Tucker why are they gone?”

Danny squeezed his eyes shut and groaned again. Noted, sound still hurt. He steeled himself and opened his eyes again.

He should have been relieved when he saw his arms, and for a moment, he was. Then he counted them and realized there were eight.

Oh, God. What the _fuck?_

He blinked. He shook his hand. Three others mimicked it. He shook his other hand. The same thing happened.

“What the fuck,” Danny said.

“Danny, what’s happening,” Sam said. “What is this, I don’t—this is messed up. This is really messed up.”

“What do you see?” he asked. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. What he’d seen already was bad enough. He felt sick.

“It’s—your hands were gone, then you sat up and shit’s just going missing and then it’s popping up in the wrong places and—oh my God, you have another hand.”

“Danny,” Tucker started, slowly. “Do you know what’s going on?”

Danny shook his head, and his friends winced. He needed to stop moving—moving was making things worse. He stood up anyway and inspected himself.

 _No no no no no no no no no that wasn’t right that was_ not normal _that was_ not happening. He was hallucinating. He was obviously hallucinating. This was a fever dream. This was not—

His hearts raced. He had four of them. Danny doubled over and threw up. It was neon green ectoplasm, and an image flashed through his mind of the Accident of the same thing.

He remembered then, vaguely, the feeling of being extruded through the portal. But his body must have collapsed somehow after the Accident—had he been injured? He didn’t know. He didn’t know anything. The only thing he _thought_ he knew was that on that _other_ axis, across the fourth dimension, he could see where the four overlapping bodies connected to some kind of central core. It wasn’t four, it was one, but his human cognition was having a hard time reconciling that.

Tucker and Sam were patting at his shoulders or his arms, whichever ones were there at the moment. It clicked, then, why they were only seeing bits and pieces of him. They’d couldn’t see the fourth dimension. They couldn’t see whatever he’d become.

He sucked in a breath and pulled his limbs back in close, but not so close that they slipped through the _out_ direction into where Sam and Tucker couldn’t see.

“What do you see?” he asked.

“You look normal,” Sam said. “What did you do? What’s happening?”

“Danny, are you…” Tucker didn’t finish.

From the way he spoke and the green recognition spiraling across his brain, Danny knew that Tucker understood. He felt relieved and appalled. He wished he could hide it. He wished none of this was happening. But he was glad that he wouldn’t have to explain this to Tucker. He’d have to tell Sam, but it would help that Tucker already knew.

Danny ran his fingers over the backs of his necks. “I don’t think I’m human anymore,” he said, and he collapsed back onto the ground.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh I guess those weren't worms. Those were fingers in your fingers, Danny.  
> I keep watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD7SBgLvjqY


	3. Chapter 3

Danny woke up in the back of Sam’s SUV, heads cradled in her lap. It was dark in the car. Sam was dozing off above him.

Danny swiped at his eyes, feeling like centipedes were crawling across his skin. He groaned at the sensation. Sam’s eyes snapped open. She shot forward, jostling him a little. “Ugh,” was all he managed to get out.

“Danny! Shit, sorry,” she said. “How do you feel?”

Danny saw Tucker waking up in the passenger seat, startled by the sudden noise he guessed.

Danny sat up. Sam pushed at the small of his back to help him raise himself. “Like shit,” he said. “How long was I out?”

Tucker leaned on the console to look at his two friends in the back. “Phone says it’s 3 am, so… eighteen hours, maybe?”

Danny made a face. “Fuck,” he said.

Sam sighed. “Yeah. No one knows we’re here. I don’t know what we’re going to tell our parents when we get back… whenever we _can_ go back.”

Danny almost asked why they couldn’t go back, but then he remembered his limbs were slipping in and out of observable reality. “I hate my life,” he declared instead. No one disagreed with him. Tucker reached out and patted one of his left arms (should he name them? Front left arm? Index left arm? He _really_ hated his life). Sam rubbed a thumb over his cheek.

“So, uh, you looked at your skin lately?” Tucker asked.

“Tucker! Some tact, maybe?” Sam chided.

Danny grit his teeth and looked at his hands. Oh, that was not good. That was _very not good._ He turned them over. His skin was mint green, and his nails looked like Sam’s—black and pointed and all too sharp. His hands shook.

“Mirror,” he said. Sam rummaged through her spider backpack and pulled out a compact. He took a deep breath, but it did nothing to calm his racing hearts. He steeled himself and opened the mirror.

His eyes were glowing neon green, and his hair was stark, glowing white, floating upwards like it was underwater, but it ended in flames. He grit his teeth again, which he regretted immediately, finding his canines pointed and all too sharp like his nails. His mouth was green. He moved the mirror _out_ and found three kaleidoscopic copies of himself.

Danny only realized how long he’d been staring when Sam gently shut the compact and took it away from him.

“Please don’t pass out again,” Tucker begged. “Or throw up again. That was really hard to clean up.”

Danny ran shaking fingers through his hair. Sam gripped his hands tightly, running her nails over his.

“I told you you should’ve tried black nail polish. It suits you,” she said.

Danny couldn’t help but laugh.

“You know I’m really, _really_ good at makeup?” she said.

“My hair’s on fire,” he said.

“Like, _really good,”_ she repeated.

“Hey, put this on,” Tucker said. He tossed his beret at Danny. Danny caught it with one of his free hands and put it on. “Yeah. Just like, don’t do _that_ with your arms, add some make-up, a hat, sunglasses… We’ve got this, dude.”

They definitely didn’t, and they all knew it, but it was nice to pretend for a minute.

Tucker crawled over the console and fell into the back seat on the other side of Danny. He threw an arm over his shoulders. Danny reveled in the comfort of being sandwiched between his two best friends. At least he had them, no matter what else happened. Even if he was some kind of extradimensional monster.

* * *

The sun was rising, casting the dense forest around them in pale orange light. Danny was considering the strange, almost-yellow color his skin turned in the light. Tucker was jotting down notes on his phone. Sam had built a campfire and was heating up beans in a small cookpot. They’d parked the car maybe a half mile away, worried that they’d stayed on the roads for too long. Tucker had mentioned going even deeper into the woods.

Danny was curled in on himself against a tree, next to a marble column and behind a field of… goo or something, he didn’t really know. He noted that his hands were only tinted yellow in normal space. If he moved them _out_ , the lighting changed. He supposed it made sense, but it was still disconcerting. He put his hands in his pockets.

“Where are we?” Danny asked.

“We’re in Northern Wisconsin in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest,” Tucker said. He smiled at him. “Sam took us on all the back roads and I faked a credit trail going south. I don’t think we need to worry about anyone finding us here.”

Danny buried his face in his hands (the one they could see, anyway). What the hell was happening? Were they runaways now? Christ. “You should go home,” he said.

Sam turned away from the fire to glare at him. The fire made it seem that her eyes glowed (like his, he remembered). It sent shivers down his spines.

“Do you really think we’d leave you alone? Especially now?” Sam said. “Don’t be stupid.”

“Yeah, _so_ not happening, dude,” Tucker said.

Danny wrapped his hands around his waists and rolled over to look away from them, then was met with the poignant reminder that _he could see everything._ He tried turning his heads in such a way that he didn’t, but it was futile. Danny gave up, settling instead for covering his eyes with his hands. That, at least, worked.

Danny pretended not to hear Sam and Tucker whispering behind him.

He was moping, he knew. Sitting there pretending nothing was happening wouldn’t change anything at all. He just didn’t know what else he could do.

Danny slid his palms down his cheeks, feeling his eyelids tug from the force. He saw everything again. Sam was piling refried beans onto one plate, then another. She picked up a third.

“Don’t bother,” Danny said.

Sam turned to look at him, a frown on her face. “You need to eat, Danny. Have you been skipping meals?” she said. “…I know you’ve lost weight.”

Danny stood up and faced her, brushing dirt and leaves (and goo and sand and other things from other places) off his shoulders. “I know, but… I don’t think normal food is enough,” he said. He shrugged.

Tucker peered up from his phone, then started tapping out more notes. “That makes sense,” he said. “I can’t imagine 2D food would affect us. It makes sense 3D food wouldn’t affect you…” Tucker scowled, then returned to his phone. Danny knew that look on his face—he’d identified a problem and wouldn’t stop working until he solved it, like a bad code.

Danny sat next to the fire and pulled his knees up to his chest. He was starving. Actually starving. That’d be a cruel irony, to survive the initial portal accident only to die from its ramifications.

Danny watched the shapes in Sam’s head churning purple and triedyt to take his mind off his own emotions.

“So I was thinking,” Sam said. “This didn’t come on all at once. I don’t understand what’s happening. I really don’t. But do you think there’s some way we could… I don’t know, just, walk it back a little?”

Danny cocked his head. “I don’t know. I mean, I think I kinda saw a few minutes into the future right after the accident, but I don’t really think I could actually _go_ there…”

“That—ok, that’s wild,” she said. She tried to give him a reassuring smile, but he could see through the façade. “What I mean to say is… I’m not stupid. I’m not saying this is reversible. But maybe under the right conditions, you could get back to what it was like yesterday morning. Just seeing things.”

Danny thought about it while Sam ate her beans and argued with Tucker until he ate his. He listened to the underbrush rustling and he remembered the feeling of _unfolding._ Could he fold back up, so to speak? At least _look_ human?

Danny held his right arms in front of him, aware of Sam and Tucker’s eyes on him. He tried holding them close to his chests, he tried squeezing his hands, he tried holding them over one another… but nothing quite recreated what he’d felt before, when he’d felt all his limbs still contained under one skin.

Danny’s stomach grumbled, and he snarled, pulling his legs up to his chests. He was frustrated, hungry, and exhausted (probably because he was hungry). The sound seemed to get Tucker’s attention.

“Your parents theorize that ectoplasm makes up everything in the Ghost Zone, right?” Tucker said, peeking out from behind his phone. “Don’t they have samples?”

Danny nodded. “Yeah. They’ve been making it artificially for years now, although I think they used everything we had to power up the portal.”

“That means we can artificially create 4D matter, even though we’re in the 3D…” Tucker trailed off and looked back to his phone.

Danny mulled over the thought. Knowing Tucker, he was trying to come up with some kind of 4D food synthesizer. He had no idea what that would be like. The thought made him feel a little sick. Anxiety knotted in his abdomens and he was once again forced to face his _plurality._ He felt bile rising in his throats. Or something like it. Hadn’t he vomited something neon green? His skin was green. Was he even flesh and blood anymore? What the hell was he made out of? Was it ectoplasm? Something else? Would they even recognize it if they tried to examine it? His blood-not-blood felt icy cold in his veins and his breathing was getting heavier, and the scent of the forest and strange green goo and dry, desert sand was suffocating him and he tried breathing deeper—

Sam jammed her elbow into Danny’s side. He choked, briefly, all the air leaving his chest at once in a moment of shock. He looked at her and saw panic. She wasn’t looking at him, and she didn’t say anything. What was she so fixated on? He refocused his gaze and—

He saw it.

Tucker was still on his phone. Danny elbowed him in the side. The other boy yelped, rubbing at the wound. “What the hell’s that for?”

Danny covered his mouth before he could say anything else and pointed into the forest. He saw the recognition flash in his mind, red irritation turning to white-hot fear before flipping into a cold, logical blue.

There was a black bear staring them down.

“Sam, what do we do?” Danny asked, removing his hand from Tucker’s mouth.

Sam wet her lips. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know. I’ve never gone this far north. I’ve never seen a bear. Fuck, I knew we should have gone east. Fuck.”

The bear watched them intently. Danny stared back, frozen. For a few moments, no one moved. Then the bear turned away.

Tucker let out a breath. “That was close,” he said. Sam shushed him, and Tucker’s panic reignited.

“He’s circling around us,” Danny said, watching the bear duck behind underbrush. He suppressed a shudder. If he couldn’t see straight through the foliage, he would have thought the bear had left them, too.

The bear circled around them. “We need to make ourselves look bigger,” Sam said. “Stand up. Raise your hands.”

Tucker and Danny did as they were told. The bear continued its winding approach. “Just—keep talking. Calm and slow, I think.”

“Ok,” Danny said, sounding a lot calmer than he felt. “What all do we know about bears?”

“We should’ve gotten bear repellant,” Tucker said.

“Well I didn’t have any, and Danny was turning _green,_ so I didn’t really think it was a priority!” Sam hissed.

Danny saw the bear lower its head slightly, but it didn’t take its eyes off them. “Not helping,” he said, and he wasn’t sure who he was directing it to. Tucker. Sam. Both.

“Right, talk calmly,” she said. “It wants our food, probably.”

“Why the hell does a bear want beans? Aren’t they carnivores?” Tucker said.

“Omnivores, but I hardly see why that matters,” Sam said. “Wave your arms.”

“All of them?” Danny asked.

“Shit. No? I don’t know. No, do it. That should freak it out,” Sam said.

Danny fanned his other arms out around them, then his legs and his heads for good measure.

The bear grunted, and continued its approach. It was only twenty feet away now, showing off its huge, hulking, black form. It didn’t look angry, or scared. It just stared straight through them, as Danny stared straight through it.

“Sam,” Danny said, and this time, he didn’t think he was hiding his fear particularly well. “I don’t think this is working.”

“The car?” Tucker asked.

“Too far,” Sam said. “Hey! Back off buddy! There’s three of us and like, three more of Danny! You’re outnumbered!”

“Yeah, get out of here!” Tucker yelled after her.

The bear yawned. Danny’s hearts skipped a beat. Did that work? Was it going to leave them alone?

But the bear charged, and Danny reacted before he knew what he was doing.

He grabbed Sam and Tucker and pushed them to the sides just before the bear made contact. It brought its jaws down toward his face, but he slipped back _in_ toward the wheat fields and heard the click of the bear’s teeth grasping empty air.

Danny flung himself forward, _around_ the bear until all his feet hit the sand. He looked _down,_ through the forest canopy. The bear was charging after Tucker. Tucker was desperately trying to keep out of range while Sam shrieked after the animal, trying to draw its attention away from him.

Danny kicked off the sand and dropped back into the forest. He landed on the bear’s back. He grabbed it by the neck, but he couldn’t overpower it. The bear threw him back, _hard,_ into the trunk of a tree.

Danny groaned. There were branches sticking through one of his legs. He moved _around_ the tree, but he could feel the wound dripping around the empty holes. His vision spun. He just wanted to sleep.

Danny shook his heads and kicked off one of the ruined columns, shooting in a horizontal back into the forest and toward the bear.

He reached his hand _out,_ then back _in_ until his hand was inside the bear’s chest. He felt its heart under his fingers, his claws threatening to puncture the organ with each beat. The bear was still. Danny felt its fear bleeding through his fingertips, and for a moment, he felt its anxiety as his own, energizing him.

Danny let go.

The bear whined, and took off in the direction it had originally come from.

Danny stared at the tracks it had left in the mud, dazed, feeling weightless. Tucker was on the ground, hands dug into the dirt. Danny peered at his own hands—green, but painted red with the bear’s blood.

“You saved me,” Tucker said. His eyes were wide and his glasses were crooked. His emotions were blank, an empty sheet of white. It hadn’t hit him yet.

Danny fell to the ground next to him. It was only hitting him, now. What the _fuck_ had just happened? Did he really just… do that?

Sam was running over to the two of them. Danny curled up on himself, trying to make himself smaller. What had he just done? He’d almost ripped its heart out. He _could’ve_ ripped its heart out, or crushed it. From the inside.

Sam crouched next to them. “You’re bleeding,” she said. “Both of you.”

Danny ignored his wounds in favor of looking for Tucker’s. Surface scrapes on his face, but nothing major. Danny looked to his own wound. It was leaking neon green. He wrapped up into himself tighter.

Tucker gasped. “Danny! You look normal!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this fic's already off the fucking rails so bears. why not.  
> enjoy a game of snake played in 4D: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1nB-Q0JOBA


End file.
